Babbling Brook

                                                   

She thought: I dunno what’s gonna happen, or how it’s gonna happen, all I know is it sure as hell will happen!

It was fuckers like you who locked up Oscar Wilde.

Terry Sick was known for his song God Bless the Civil Service.

There’s a homeless man about my age sitting on the church’s stone window ledge.

She got off the bus in Stoneybatter with her torn tights and handbag of leather.

On Verschoyle Court he wept, quietly, in the surprisingly mild November afternoon.

Her mind travelled to a house on Carlingford Parade where on winter evenings in 1993 she went to drink whiskey and get caned.

Every pulse in him beat at double time.

How’d I ever know anything b4 I cud look up stuff at my fingertips the livelong day?

Just fucking google it! JFGI: A shadowy expectation of a personal existence after death.

‘Then they sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives.’

His name was Dickerson Naylor Minthorn.

Those trolls will destroy their own souls with so much fanaticism and hate enslaving them.

I ain’t gonna go and troll for nobody.

His initial burst of fame came from appearing on a daytime television show to deny impregnating an extremely overweight girl.

He was tracked to a bail hostel in a seaside town on the south coast.

He howled like a shipwrecked man who had lost everything.

He read the following: ‘Like gypsies when Borrow read the New Testament to them.’

It’s fuckers like you who abuse people in care homes.

A man named Borthrop Cresacre showed up.

The shop was packed with people drawn by rumours of a delivery of saucepans.

Judge Fartington sat on the bench.

—‘Grace saved me,’ the wretch said. ‘I feel amazing!’

Deaf bald Pat took his phone out hoping a junkie would try to steal it.

Then came Kyle Padbury along with Mr Pollexfen.

He was an atheist who believed in nothing but himself.

All winter long I waited to hear your song, but when I tried hardest I failed the most.

A brace of rock-bottomed bums bothered her in the street for change.

After a couple of days he came up with the line: ‘When the city was hit by airstrikes, the first thing people abandoned was their pets.’

She read: ‘The reason people keep pets is that they get to play God.’

I came to a horrid bit of lath and plaster in myself where I thought it was all good stone.

He reflected on the fact that every day he remained alive he was cheating death.

Out jogging one night she found herself thinking of death and was disturbed to realise that it excited her.

She started to work on a story called Vladimir’s Tears, the tale of a boy who realises he can’t take his billions with him.

—‘We won’t be here forever,’ she said.

—‘But we’re here now,’ he answered, smiling broadly.

© Brian Ahern 2014